Influence of Study Interest and School Location on the Attitude of Secondary School Students towards Mathematics in Ekiti State, Nigeria

The study made an investigation as to whether the study interest and school location of students have significant influence on the attitudes of secondary school students towards Mathematics. The population of the study consisted of all secondary school students in Ekiti State, Nigeria. 600 students comprising of 300 male and 300 female secondary school students were randomly selected for the study from 12 secondary schools in ten out of the 16 local government areas in Ekiti State, Nigeria. A 28-item attitude scale in Mathematics constructed and validated by the researcher was the instrument used. The items in the scale have discriminating power of 0.72 and above and item total correlation coefficients of 0.23 and above. The scale used has a construct validity coefficient of 0.29 using discriminant analysis and reliability coefficient of 0.81 using Cronbach reliability method. Two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Hypothesis one was tested using Students’ t-test while hypothesis two was tested using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Scheffe’s post-hoc test for pairwise comparison. The results of the analysis showed that there was no significant difference in the attitude of students from rural and urban setting towards Mathematics and that location did not influence the attitude of secondary school students towards Mathematics. The results also showed that study interest has significant difference on the attitude of students towards Mathematics and that study interest has influence on the attitude of secondary school students towards Mathematics. Therefore, it is recommended that efforts should be made by the teachers, parents and government to inculcate positive attitude of students towards Mathematics irrespective of their study interest.